


pick up every stitch

by Stratisphyre



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, rivals to friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:29:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26664469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stratisphyre/pseuds/Stratisphyre
Summary: For the past twenty-six years, the Tyler family magic shoppe had been the only one of its kind in town.When a new shop opens in town, Rose doesn't immediately hate the new owner. She gives him the chance to open his mouth first.
Relationships: Tenth Doctor & Rose Tyler
Comments: 9
Kudos: 21
Collections: Doctor Who Classic Tropes Event





	pick up every stitch

**Author's Note:**

> I was so glad to be able to participate in the Rose-Tenth Doctor Classic Tropes event. Huge shout out to the mods for organizing this. I had a blast. :) My trope was "rival shop owners" and, needless to say, this got away from me a bit. 
> 
> The title comes from Donovan/Lana Del Rey's "Season of the Witch" because I have zero willpower.

For the past twenty-six years, the Tyler family magic shoppe had been the only one of its kind in town. As rumour had it a rival had once been all set to open his own place before he'd crossed paths with Rose's grandmum and given up the enterprise after falling arse over teakettle for her.

And then, as autumn began its gradual creep towards winter, the only empty location on the high street was let.

"I hope it's something practical," Martha said as she browsed Rose's offerings. Martha was primarily responsible for depleting Rose's stock of luck potions; she'd never gone into a surgery without knocking one back like a shot, despite Rose's assurances it would work just as well if mixed into a nice cup of tea.

"Anything but practical," Clara disagreed. Clara rarely bought anything during her weekend visits, happy instead to loiter perched on Rose's countertop and flipping through whatever novel had caught her attention for the week. "We have enough practical shoppes on the high street already. I want something terribly _im_ practical. A boutique." Her eyes lit up. "Or a bakery."

"Not sure how your Basil would feel about a bakery," Rose pointed out.

Clara flapped her hand. "He's not _my_ Basil."

Rose and Martha traded a glance, but neither were inconsiderate enough to mention Clara's carefully-managed perch on the countertop gave per the perfect vantage point to watch the owner of the cafe across the street whenever he was behind the counter. (Then again, it likewise gave her the perfect vantage to watch Bill, his sole employee and the only other person in town he trusted with his absurdly elaborate espresso machine. Knowing Clara, it might've been either of them).

"What do you think, Rose?" Martha asked.

"Anything, so long as the owner isn't a complete tit," Rose laughed.

She really should've remembered to touch wood.

As it happened, she had the chance to meet the new neighbour at the local Business Owner's Association meeting later that week. He was introduced to the group as 'The Doctor,' and—with a furtive glance in Rose's direction—the BOA president announced he was in the business of magic.

"But real magic," the Doctor said.

"Real magic," Rose repeated.

"Yeah. Not mucking about with granny's knickers and dandelions and the like," he continued with a grin inviting them to share in his assessment. "Proper magic. Technical Application of Reality Distortion and Intelligent Sorcery."

Rose stared, dumbfounded. Turned to the BOA president, earned herself a helpless shrug, and stared even more.

The Doctor turned his megawatt grin on her. “What did you say you did again?” 

“Muck about with granny’s knickers and dandelions, apparently.” 

The smile froze on his face. 

Rose decided not to wait around to see if he’d scramble to make excuses.

* * *

“It’s all terribly Jane Austen, isn’t it?” Clara asked the next day. Across the street, Basil happened to be working behind the counter, adding a point to his tally. 

“How do you mean?” Rose’s attention remained mostly focused on the inventory list in front of her. There was a full moon coming up, conditions perfect for certain potions requiring a nice bit of moonboil. 

“Well, a handsome stranger shows up and insults you without realizing it.” Clara peeked up from her book. “Would you say your pride has been mortally offended?”

“I’d say if you try to turn my life into a regency romance we’re going to have strong words about it.” 

Clara didn’t roll her eyes. She didn’t need to, when the tilt of her chin and small twitch of her mouth suggested it was a bygone conclusion. 

“What’s the difference anyway?” she piped up again a moment later. 

“Craft is all intuition. High magic is, apparently, ‘science.’” She was going to be short of dried rosemary. She made a quick note of it in the margin of her sheet. 

“What did you say he looked like?” 

“Tall bloke.” She pursed her lips and reluctantly admitted, “Great hair. Nice smile. Insufferable pretension. Why?” 

“He’s coming this way.” 

Rose’s head shot up as the Doctor slid into the store, blinking wounded at the cheerful chimes announcing his entrance. 

“Hello,” he said absently, his attention darting around the crowded shelves. Rose’s shoppe featured more than just her own brewed potions; she offered a collection of items for any novice looking to dive into the world of craft. She’d gotten accustomed to the casual browser meandering through her store, picking up a couple of things to try at home themselves, and then reliably returning again and again for her homebrewed potions or, as she liked to call them, ‘custom solutions for everyday problems.’ It brought in a tidy sum, and she doubted ‘the Doctor’ would be able to provide the like. 

“Doctor,” Rose greeted stiffly. 

“I came to apol— Is that book bound in human skin?!”

Oh, honestly. “Do I look like a person who stocks books bound in human skin?” 

“I don’t know what a person who stocks books bound in human skin might look like.” 

“Until this moment I never knew myself,” Clara sighed. 

Rose found herself extremely ready for school to go back in. “Do you have somewhere to be?” she demanded.

Clara graciously took the hint and winked at the Doctor on her way out the door. Rose didn’t need to watch her to know she’d headed across the street to the cafe. 

She turned her attention back to the Doctor. “Now then, you were accusing me of being a serial killer?” 

“Oh! Yes. Or, rather, no. I hoped I, er, why do you stock freeze dried salamander?”

“It’s good for burns.” 

“Alternately I think the chemist sells aloe vera.” 

“Which is fine for sunburns, but not nearly as effective when you’re dealing with serious injuries.”

The Doctor scoffed. “What, are you claiming a little bit of ground up amphibian is capable of healing third degree burns?” 

“Was there something you needed?”

“Yes. I came to say you needn’t have any worries about staying in business. I’m strictly high magic. The real stuff. Working on my new dissertation, actually, on ley line impact on the efficacy of Rassilon’s Sixth Form.” 

“Right.”

“Nothing your average shopgirl would get, obviously, but the implications of—”

Rose could be the bigger person. Could be. “Right, there’s the door. Out.” She simply wasn’t planning on it this time.

The Doctor blinked. “Pardon?” 

“I’m invoking the right to refuse service.” 

“I don’t want service?”

“Then you’re loitering. Out.” 

“Not very neighbourly of you.” 

Rose’s jaw set in a tight clench and, perhaps for the first time, the Doctor seemed to read the room. He ducked his head and muttered something under his breath before slumping out through the door. 

It would not take much effort to deal the Doctor a few small inconveniences. Maybe ensure he stubbed his toe every time he turned a corner. Or continually lose track of his keys. Or change his luck so he always sat in something wet. 

Rose hated people who misused craft in such a matter, but it didn’t mean she couldn’t understand them. 

She reapplied her attention to her inventory, mood soured right up until Clara returned a few minutes later with two macchiatos and a box of Basil’s excellent lemon-thyme sablés to split.

* * *

The full moon took a lot out of Rose. She barely managed to rouse herself to use the loo at half-noon the next morning, and then immediately stumbled back to bed to pass out once again. 

When she well and truly crawled out of bed, late into the evening, she found her mum puttering about in her kitchen, making supper. While Rose might’ve been annoyed at any other time, this soon after such an intense use of magic she’d’ve happily eaten literally anything put in front of her. A real meal settled in front of her without needing to cook for herself? Heaven. The meat and two veg went down quickly; welcome and wonderfully delicious. 

Also, judging from the way each mouthful nudged her back towards wakefulness, Jackie tossed a powerful restorative into the gravy. Jackie once worked in the shop when Gran had been in charge, and stuck around when it’d been handed over to Rose. Craft wasn’t her passion, though she’d always vocally appreciated it more than high magic. Craft didn’t go about giving people airs, apparently. 

“I nipped into the shop earlier to help myself to a restorative,” Jackie said over a bite of nips. “Met your new neighbour. Bit of a tit, in’he?” 

Rose sniffed. “Can say that again.” She frowned. “What did he want?” Maybe she’d misjudged him?

“Dropped off some burn cream. I asked if you’d hurt yourself and he said something about relying on actual medicine if you ever did?”

Rose drained the remainder of her wine in a single swallow and waved for Jackie to pass the rest of the bottle. 

“Don’t worry love, I showed him the aisle for the suppositories, and told him if none of them worked I would use my shoe.”

“I love you, mum.”

* * *

While Rose occasionally spotted him about town, the Doctor remained tucked up in his own shop after the incident with Jackie. Like everyone else with a storefront on the high street, he nipped in and out of Basil’s practically every morning. And, of course, he attended the biweekly BOA meetings, sat on the other side of the room with eyes aimed straight forward. It gave Rose a chance to enjoy his profile, at least. He was a good-looking bloke, unfortunately, especially in the rare moments when he got really wound up about something. 

The something this week happened to be an infestation of pixies who’d started their migration a couple of weeks early, and decided to temporarily settle themselves in his rafters. 

“Annoying little scunners,” Basil muttered, for once offering something other than sarcastic commentary. “Right pains in the arse. Plopped in on me last year. Guess they thought better of it this time around.”

“Oh?” The Doctor straightened. “How did you get rid of them?”

“Ointment from Rose did it like a trick.” 

The Doctor’s jaw flapped in a picture-perfect impersonation of a particularly expressive goldfish. “Aw. Well. That is. I.” 

“Any one of those is a way to start a sentence, but I think you need a few more words to make one,” Rose offered shortly. 

“Are there local exterminators?”

“For fuck’s sake, they’re pixies. Either take Rose’s shite or put out a few nibbles and wait it out,” Basil groaned. 

Rose decided to give Basil the friends and family discount next time he came in.

The Doctor, she noted, never stopped by. And it weren’t as though she’d made extra ointment in case he decided to. That would’ve been mental. And even if she did, it worked wonders on blackheads.

* * *

When the Doctor had been at school, learning High Magic and all its intricacies, there’d been a single unifying message: energy existed to be contained, controlled and directed, and only through proper use of High Magic did anyone have a prayer of doing so. 

“Craft,” more than one instructor sneered, “Is a figment of imagination. Witches are shams preying on the profound ignorance of the common man.” 

It only confirmed everything he’d learned at his mother’s knee as a child. Their village employed a local witch, a half-rotted smelly septuagenarian who’d doled out home remedies and vile concoctions which all did more harm than good. He vividly recalled leather-hard skin pulled taut over twisted fingers, and her sending him on his way with a clap to the ear when he’d asked her too many questions. Not until a real chemist opened shop had she been exposed as a fraud, and even then people kept returning to her for help. It beggared imagination. 

Needless to say, when he’d let the store on the high street to continue his studies, it irritated him to realize he’d be rubbing shoulders with a common hedge witch, no matter how pretty she was. Or how nice she smelled. Or the zesty, zingy, zippiness tripping down his spine whenever he entered her shop. He’d studiously avoided the place since meeting her mother. Lord what an experience. 

He’d adopted a purely ‘live and let live’ policy when it came to Rose Tyler and all her false promises. Their work never intersected, save for the outrageously boring Business Owner’s Association meetings. _Why_ they met once a week went well over his head when all they seemed to do was talk for hours and said nothing. 

“What do you sell, anyway?” Bill had wandered in only a few minutes ago, carrying the pasty he’d forgotten to take with him during a hasty escape from Basil’s, all in an effort to escape the excoriating glare of their local hedge witch. 

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” Bill asked through a sceptical twist of her lip. “Doesn’t seem like a great business model.” 

“Oh, I get all my funding through the University. This is mostly a quiet place for me to continue my research. Somewhere quiet and out of the city.” 

“Always wanted to go to Uni,” she admitted, running a hand over the well-worn leather spines of his extensive book collection. “Why not just do it all at home?” 

“Because,” the Doctor said, comparing a roughed-out casting circle to the illustration he’d mapped out a few days prior, “Then I’d never sleep.” 

Bill barked out a laugh. “You’re having me on. You wore the exact same thing yesterday. And Clara spotted you passed out on the floor on her way home last night.” 

The Doctor peered up at her through narrowed eyes. “More floor space, then. Commercial venues are perfect for intricate casting because of the square footage. Not like I want to go shoving aside my ottoman whenever I need to draw a circle on the floor.” 

“Rose never talks about circles,” Bill said.

The Doctor rolled his eyes. “No doubt. High Magic takes precision and skill, both of which I’ve found most Hedge Witches somewhat lacking.”

“Funny, Rose says High Magic is for pretentious arseholes who want to control the universe.” 

The Doctor abruptly lowered the sketch. “Do you need something, Miss Potts?” 

“Yeah. Six quid for the sarnie.” 

“Oh. Right.” 

The next day, when Rose entered Basil’s, the Doctor remained in place at the counter with a straight back and eyes fixed forward. 

“Your usual, Rose?” Basil called. 

“Ta, Basil,” Rose replied. She took a spot next to the Doctor, also apparently determined to ignore him. Or so he thought, until she said, “Thank you for the burn cream,” in a tone stiff enough to be served on the rocks. 

“You’re welcome.” Maybe an olive branch? “Sorry I missed you.”

“Well, night after the full moon. You know how it is.” 

“I worked on a circle that evening.”

“Moonlight’s a powerful focus,” Rose agreed.

Basil handed the Doctor’s coffee over the pass and the Doctor took it with a nod. 

“How’d you know that?” the Doctor asked. 

Rose stared in disbelief. “What do you think I did all night?” 

The Doctor shrugged. “Sleeping? What else would you be doing?” 

Rose rolled her eyes, collected her own cup, and made her way out of the cafe. Basil tilted an eyebrow at the Doctor, who shrugged haplessly. 

“She’s quite fond of dark chocolate,” Basil told him.

The Doctor frowned. “Why do I need to know this?” 

“For when you eventually feel the need to apologize.” 

“Be a long wait,” the Doctor sniffed.

Basil hummed noncommittally and began the next order. 

The next evening’s BOA meeting began promptly at five o’clock—early in deference to a community picnic everyone seemed expected to attend. The Doctor tended to tune out everything said at the bloody meetings; nothing much applied to him, considering his use of his space could generously be called unorthodox and he gave a fig about what everyone else was doing with theirs. 

He’d only just begun contemplating what a north-oriented secant might do when utilized in Rassilon’s Sixth Form when Doctor Martha Jones burst through the door. 

"My niece has wandered off!" 

The Doctor jumped to his feet along with every other adult in the room, attention zeroed in on Doctor Jones as she directed them to the picnic grounds on the east side of town, where the young child toddled off during the chaos of organizing the event, too many adults all making different assumptions around who was watching her. Might’ve happened to anyone.

As the exit crowded with people on their way to help, the Doctor paused when he noticed their resident hedge witch hanging back, her gaze locked with Doctor Jones'. A mean, ugly worry settled concrete-heavy in his stomach, and he found himself dawdling near the door, as though by merit of lingering he would prevent what he was certain to be an outrageous example of exploitation. He didn't _want_ to believe Miss Tyler was one of those people who preyed on people while they were weak, but each time he interacted with her and heard her unfounded claims he grew increasingly determined to avoid her outright instead of righteously tearing into her. 

"Do you have anything of Keisha’s with you? Metal would be best," Rose asked. 

Martha opened her impressively large shoulder bag and rifled through it to produce a toy car. "Will this do?" 

"Perfect. I'll go back to the shoppe and see about finding her. You go with the search party... you might find her quicker." 

This brought him to his breaking point. "Now hold on just one moment!" the Doctor yelled. 

Martha levelled Rose a pitying glance before scurrying off, leaving the other shoppe owner to turn and examine at the Doctor with deeply unimpressed eyes. "Yes?" 

"It's one thing to go about selling people things they don't need based on superstition and the placebo effect. It's quite another to offer false hope to people desperate for help. This is a child’s life we’re talking about!”

“Yes, and all we’re doing standing here is keeping me from helping. So either get your arse in gear or go join the search party.” 

The Doctor’s lips pursed. Rose brought out her best glare. 

“Yes, fine,” he finally punched out, “But for the record—”

“For the record, I am not the sort of woman who preys on people’s hopes for money,” Rose snapped out, “Or whatever it is you think I’m doing.” Rose's hand twitched at her side even as her mouth pinched into an angry grimace. She took, what seemed to him to be, a fortifying breath, and then consciously relaxed each muscle in her body. "Is it your opinion of me, or of craft?" 

The Doctor opened and then shut his mouth. Rose, to him, seemed beautiful and slightly terrifying and wonderfully empathetic—not two weeks after he'd joined the BOA, she'd organized a charity drive on behalf of complete strangers after hearing they’d stumbled onto hard times. So no, it didn't line up with his expectations of craft users. Hedge witches. How else did she account for offering the impossible in times of emergency? 

Obviously something of his thoughts flitted across his face, because Rose held out her hand. "Come with me." 

He frowned. "I should join the search party." _As should you_ went unsaid, though he thought it loud enough in her direction Rose must've heard it. 

"You can. Or you can let me prove to you I'm not some con artist." 

The Doctor stared at her, brow drawn. He wanted to believe her, was the problem. And it was a problem because the last time he'd wanted to believe in someone so badly it all went horribly sideways. 

"All right," he said. 

He took her hand. 

The BOA met in a community centre a few blocks over from her shoppe, and they half-ran the entire way there. She led him through the shoppe to a door behind the counter he’d failed to notice during his few, mostly aborted, visits. He paused at her heels when she opened it, the accosting scent smashing into his face in a wall of conflicting smells. He could barely manage to parse even a handful of the smells hitting him; mint, dried flowers, old leather and so many other sundry scents conspiring to destroy his olfactory senses. His face contorted and he coughed while trying to breathe through it. 

Rose, he noted, seemed unaffected. At least, by the room. He was fairly confident she’d rolled her eyes at him. 

Rose collected a few odds and ends, and waved the Doctor to the sink to grab a pot. There were six or seven of them sitting by the sink, one of which already brimming with brackish sludge. Probably not that one, then. He chose a sturdy copper specimen and followed Rose’s instructions for filling it halfway with cold water. "Tap water works then, does it?"

"I have a filter," Rose shrugged. “Grab me the ginger, will you?” 

"How much?" the Doctor asked, staring at the water with deep uncertainty.

From her place in the pantry, Rose waved a hand. "About the length of your thumb. Ish."

"Ish?" the Doctor repeated. His face twisted up, appalled. "Ish isn't a unit of measurement."

"It's my favourite unit of measurement," Rose corrected. She emerged, a half-dozen jars all balanced carefully atop one another. "Hold up your thumb? Yeah, 'bout that much. Make sure you pound it to paste in the marble one, yeah? Definitely don't use the slate."

The Doctor considered the assortment of mortar and pestles, five all in all, with bewilderment. "What difference does it make?"

"All the difference," Rose told him in an absent tone as she dropped the jars on the countertop and began digging through a drawer crowded with dozens of different cooking utensils. "Or does high magic not rely on bits and bobs to work?"

"We certainly _do not_ ," the Doctor said. "Bits and bobs? What sort of magic needs 'bits and bobs.'" His head twitched as he said the words, lips curled around them as they exited his mouth like he’d expectorated something particularly sour.

"My kind," Rose said. She finally settled on a redwood spoon.

She returned the pot to the stovetop and dropped in the crystal she'd retrieved earlier. Noting the Doctor's inquisitive look, she shrugged. "Chalcopyrite. To find lost things."

Seemed a bunch of hooey to him, but considering the faith the rest of the town seemed to have in her, he wasn't prepared to say anything about it. He smashed up the ginger at her direction as she added in a sprinkling of other ingredients, slowly pounding the previously generous pile to so much mush, until he’d satisfied Rose, who gestured for him to add it to the pot.

"Pass me Keisha’s car, then," Rose said, briskly stirring the pot counterclockwise seven times.

The Doctor produced the toy from his pocket. Rose took it from him and dropped it into the pot.  
"Wait," the Doctor said. Before he said anything more, Rose wrapped her hands around the side of the pot and closed her eyes.

It flash boiled, the concoction bubbling up to the very top of the pot and bubbling furiously away. Real magic. The sort of which he hadn't believed witches capable, which raised the hair on his arms and sent shivers down his spine. As far as he'd known, craft only existed as two-thirds practical application of basic knowledge and one-third superstition. He never considered actual magic to be possible.

His foot would've doubtless tasted better with a smear of mustard.

As quickly as it boiled, the liquid evaporated away and left behind the small stone and the truck, now aglow with a faint orange cast to it.

"Here we go," Rose said, plucking it up out of the pot as though it hadn't been sitting in boiling something-or-other only moments before. She offered it to the Doctor. "It will grow warmer the closer we come to her."

The Doctor would've scoffed—location spells the sort of which Rose described were next to impossible to cast and not at all reliable—yet he found himself appreciating the calm certainty in her gaze. He couldn't put a finger on why.

"Right," he finally said. Rose's expression shuttered, and he realized the awkwardly long pause must've come across as skepticism. "Really. Let’s go find her then."

Rose's smile returned. 

They left her shoppe smelling of ginger, the truck cool in his hand until he passed by Churchill Street and it began to warm in his palm. Blinking in surprise, he turned west and it warmed even further. 

“That’s the opposite way of the picnic grounds,” he pointed out. 

“Trust the spell,” Rose replied evenly. 

The Doctor’s mouth twitched down and he let the heat guide him. They passed over the berm separating the town from the small brook lazily trickling along the town’s border, the truck warming incrementally with each step. 

“This won’t burn me when we find her, will it?” the Doctor asked absently. 

Rose’s real smile proved surprisingly dazzling, and the Doctor felt his heart skip a beat. “No.” 

Past the brook—easy enough to ford, even for a five-year-old—a generous copse collected in an ambitious effort to become a mighty forest. Roots, dead leaves and suspiciously verdant vegetation covered the ground in a proper tangled mess. The truck became uncomfortably hot against the skin of his palm. 

“There,” Rose said. She grabbed the Doctor’s free hand and dragged him into the brush, wincing as they passed by a vicious bush happy to scratch up her bare legs. Rose dodged beneath a moss-covered log, into a cavity created by the upended roots. 

“Rose?” a tentative voice whispered. 

The truck flashed through with a last burst of heat before abruptly cooling. The Doctor ducked down to peek at the empty space, relief coursing through him when he spotted Young Miss Jones safely ensconced in Rose’s arms. A few scratches dug grooves into her cheeks and she shivered with cold, but she seemed otherwise unharmed. Her trousers were wet all the way to her waist; she must’ve walked the entire way downstream from the picnic site to make it this far.

“Here,” the Doctor offered, holding out his arms. 

Rose eased the girl out of the hidey-hole and into the Doctor’s grasp. Keisha tangled her limbs about the Doctor’s torso, clinging moppet-like as the Doctor straightened. Rose scrambled out of the hole and brushed off her knees. 

“Let’s get you home,” she said, running a soothing hand over Keisha’s back. She sighed and nodded, rubbing a snotty nose against the Doctor’s neck. Surprisingly, he didn’t mind.

* * *

Passing Keisha back to Leo Jones, and seeing the explosion of joy crossing his face when he took his daughter back, twisted up in the Doctor’s chest with severe cute aggression until he needed to avert his eyes.

“Thank you,” Leo stammered out through happy tears. 

“It was all Rose,” the Doctor said, frowning to himself when he realized it to be the truth of the matter. He checked about for her, unsurprised to see her folded in Martha’s thankful embrace. 

The reunited Jones family parted a moment later; Leo to call off the remaining search party while Martha took Ollie home to his mother and sister. It left the Doctor standing awkwardly in want of occupation to avoid doing what he absolutely _hated_ to do. 

No help for it. “I want to apologize.” 

Rose fully turned his way. “Oh?” 

“I never properly understood craft,” he continued. “And you, obviously. So… I’m sorry.” 

Rose took pity on him, possibly because blokes undergoing dental surgery usually looked less pained. “Thank you.” She held out her hand. 

When the Doctor grasped it in a firm shake, a crawling sensation of rightness scurried up his arm and settled itself in his chest. 

What was it Basil said about dark chocolate?

* * *

The Doctor, curiously, became a frequent visitor to her shoppe in the weeks following Keisha’s safe return. Whether out of mordant curiosity or a genuine desire to see her, Rose couldn’t be sure and never really cared to examine for reasons completely unrelated to how her stomach thudded out a quick tattoo whenever she saw him on the sidewalk outside her shoppe. He certainly _seemed_ interested in her. Her craft, anyway. It became abundantly clear the school he'd attended was one of the more traditional in its leanings, the sort which enjoyed sought out the worst sort of hedge witches to use as proof purely to discredit the rest of them them, back before the reinvigoration of cottage-based online stores laid tracks in the grassroots her predecessors left behind. His curiosity might've seemed pedantic, if he hadn't been so sincere about it.

The fourth or fifth time he showed up in the middle of the day, brimming with questions and twitching, chaotic energy, Rose decided to put him to work. That sort of manic excitement was excellent for certain applications. 

“I want you to hold this,” Rose said, pushing a mason jar into his hand. 

The Doctor frowned at it in confusion, shaking it until the crystal at the bottom clinked against the sides. “What is it?” 

“Two parts macca, one part ginseng. Celestite for clarity. A few other odds and ends.”

“No bits and bobs?” the Doctor asked with a sly smile. 

“Later,” Rose replied with a wink. “You need to sit as still as possible for as long as possible.” 

“What happens if I move?” 

“It’ll explode and kill us both.” The Doctor boggled at the jar and Rose laughed. “Kidding.”

The Doctor grumbled, and sat still as possible all the same. Rose watched him begin to tap his foot, an unconscious beat. A finger began tapping against the side of the glass. Then another. He shifted around in his seat. His left foot began to bounce counterpoint to his right. Rose smiled down at the papers in front of her. 

“It’s bubbling,” the Doctor said in surprise. 

“Keep holding on.”

“But it’s _bubbling_.” 

Rose glanced upwards. Small bubbles formed a ring along the bottom of the jar. “It’s supposed to.” 

“I’m not _doing_ anything.” His hands almost slipped off the jar and he readjusted his grip. “I’m not even keeping still like you said.” 

Rose smirked. “You’re doing perfectly.” 

He settled with the praise and sat still for a full minute before his leg began to jiggle once more. The bubbles began slowly drifting upwards, a gentle effervescence slowly growing in intensity until the Doctor yelled in surprise when it broke into a rolling boil. Rose lunged to catch it when he sprung to his feet and almost let it crash to the floor. 

“What.” He stared at the jar, now only half-filled with still liquid tinted with an eerie green glow. 

“You were perfect, thanks.” 

“What was I perfect at, precisely?” 

“It’s a pick me up. Better than a strong cuppa tea or decent coffee, and without the letdown of caffeine withdrawal.” 

“So, me sitting there…” 

“You have a lot of extra energy. It gave it a bit of a boost. Usually it takes me a full hour to get it to boil.” 

“Then why tell me to sit still?” 

Rose laughed. “Nothing makes a person want to move more than being told they can’t.” 

“What if I had?” Rose leveled him with a Look. “Fair enough. All right. Should I feel, I don’t know, tired?” 

“Craft isn’t about taking away from the witch doing it. It’s about giving back to the world and letting yourself help it.”

The Doctor stared at her, and Rose chuckled before darting in to kiss his cheek. Before she got too far away, the Doctor grabbed her hand. She turned to face him. 

“Do you... want to go to dinner with me?” He hadn’t meant to say it. It slipped out, and even he appeared shocked at the presumption. 

Rose smiled so hard her cheeks hurt. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s… yes.” 

The Doctor nodded. “Great. Fantastico! I. I… I don’t know any good places around here.” 

“Shameful. You’ve been here two months.” Rose tilted her head consideringly. “Do you like Italian?” 

“Love it. _Molto bene!_ ” He blinked. “Does this town have Italian?” 

“No. But I make a pretty good lasagne.” She leaned in close, eyes darting down to his lips. “I’ll go easy on the garlic.” 

The Doctor’s face split in an enormous grin. “Rose Tyler, you are brilliant.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! All comments and kudos gratefully accepted.


End file.
